Fastest $2 Billion Start-up Ever

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Stewart Butterfield has certainly left his mark on the tech world, and has helped shape the Internet as we know it today. In 2004, Butterfield was a co-founder to Flickr, a photo sharing service, and Yahoo soon acquired their company just a year after launching. Last year saw the debut of Slack, which is an office communication tool, that can be very useful when in the right hands, making it powerful, but yet quite playful as well.

Slack is now the fastest company to reach a $2 billion dollar valuation, which is clearly just incredible. Business Insider had a chance to sit down and talk with Butterfield about his 20 years in the tech field, and what he sees coming for the future.

What makes this tech boom different from the dot-com bubble: “The scale of revenue growth is unprecedented if you look back over history, whether you’re looking at the railway robber baron era or the 1920s or the ’50s or the ’70s. It used to take a long time for a company to get to the point where they had tens of millions of dollars of revenue. It was almost never an overnight phenomenon. Now more and more people are doing that.”

Will Slack replace email: “Everyone can have [email]. It can cross organizational boundaries. No one owns it. It’s not some particular company’s platform. Like raw SMS, it will be around for a long time. Email will probably be around for many decades to come.”

After Flickr was sold to Yahoo what happened: “I had never worked at a big company before, and I had no idea … There were a lot of politics and turf wars and a lot of wasted potential as a result of a lack of unity around the purpose of what people were doing. Some people would show up to work every day, really looking out for themselves as opposed to trying to collaborate to create something amazing.”

This was just some highlights of his incredible interview from a true master of the technological world. If you are craving more from Mr. Butterfield feel free to check the rest out on Business Insider.

Down below is a list of the “Fastest Out Of The Gate” companies, a pretty cool, and talented list of companies. Most of them are heavily enshrined in the technology field.

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